Global awareness campaign on local waste segregation

With the help of friends from different countries, The Circular Community has started a global Facebook ‘Like’ campaign to raise environmental awareness amongst local residents under its ‘Your environment, your responsibility’ campaign. The goal of the campaign is educating residents how to segregate their household waste and minimise the impact of waste on the environment.

One waste bin

In most places residents put all their litter into one waste bin. In these cases nobody can benefit from the upworth potential of modern waste disposal and recycling methods. We are engaging residents to come up with plans to improve local waste segregation and convince their local government they should provide them the means to do so.

Bins for different waste streams

Local municipalities are responsible for waste collecting and processing. In most municipalities worldwide, residents still can not segregate their waste in an efficient way, even if they are willing to do this. Therefore local governments have to take their environmental responsibility and provide residents different waste bins for different waste streams. Either large public containers, small household bins or -even better- a combination of these two.

The next step

The next step is to educate residents how to segregate and dispose their waste into the correct bins. We have learned that municipalities are able to recycle up to 80% of their waste as long as local governments have programmes to improve waste segregation and engage local influencers. It is a common mistake from governments to think that waste only costs money. Yes, the processing and disposal costs of unsorted waste streams are high. In the linear economy model that’s a fact.

Sorted waste streams are valuable

On the contrary sorted waste streams are valuable to companies who can recover raw materials from these streams. That’s the most important step in the Circular Economy model, where waste becomes a resource and has economical value. Providing the means for better waste segregation to residents will cost money at first but the Return On Investment is high. Not only from an environmental point of view, but also from an economical point of view when it comes to employment, savings and earnings. In fact, there is no reason for municipalities to reject better waste collection and sorting.